THE VISION AMONG THE BEDPANS

Susan Crosland on what it was like

to spend Christmas in an NHS hospital

MARYLANDERS drink a lot. Sunday brunch in the Green Spring Valley consist- ed of sausages, crispy bacon and waffles, washed down with mint juleps. After an hour or so of this refreshment, my admirer and I saddled up, I astride his cherished stallion. I was 18.

The beast could scarcely believe his luck at finding this silly, tiddly girl on his back. In a thrice he had the bit between his teeth. Leaping over untold fences, we at last galloped along a twisting country lane until a car rounded the bend. The stallion reared, slipped, fell and rolled over me. My admirer's courtship waned. I had no doubt he would have preferred his stallion to be the one in hospital and I the one who was shot.

Years later the chickens came home to roost. This festive season I find myself in the orthopaedic ward of one of London's foremost NHS hospitals nursing my wound from a hip operation. A host of heavenly voices rises from the corridor outside our bay. They sound like castrati, but as they are Haileybury schoolboys, I suppose their voices have not yet broken. The choristers begin with 'Rudolph the Red-nosed Rein- deer', which my monoglot Spanish neigh- bour persists in calling 'Jesus the Red-nosed Reindeer'. But at least Jesus proper gets a look-in in the next song.

Six beds are in my bay, three facing three. A camaraderie develops. I am teth- ered in traction, a steel rod through my shinbone, recalling the Spanish Inquisi- tion. Should my nurses' call-bell drop out of reach, the other patients press theirs. If a nurse takes more than 10 minutes to respond, the patients nearest the corridor shout, 'Nurse! Bedpan! Urgent!' That brings them running.

One in our bay remains insulated and isolated — a pretty 19-year-old with long, straight, honey-coloured hair. I thought she was a film star when she first walked in, surrounded by minders, each dressed in navy with a white shirt. Then I saw the horrendous slit, long and deep, in her fore- arm. On the other was a matching scar.

One minder could be a catwalk model. Her dark hair, cut like a man's, adds to her androgyny and she enjoys running her long slender fingers through it. I'd guess she's fleet of foot. Another is built like a Javanese wrestler. They work 12-hour shifts, two at a time. Whenever the girl they are minding throws back her bed- clothes to announce, 'I'm going,' the three rise as one.

Nurses are not meant to discuss their patients, but usually the rest of the bay can Mabel, sometimes I think you only married me for my disabled sticker.' piece together a brief history of each. The long-haired girl is a patient of a mental hospital. One morning her bed is empty, her minders vanished. During the night, despite the surveillance, she swallowed a fork. Thus, she was moved to the Surgical Ward. The week before, she had swallowed a spoon.

The next occupant of the bed is The Vision. Her curtain of golden tresses hangs so thick and long that she has to keep throwing it over her shoulder. From all directions, young male doctors stride across the ward to attend this possessor of inordi- nate beauty. They close the curtains around The Vision's cubicle while they take turns examining her injured hand, its nails gleaming with flawless varnish. When they re-emerge, one by one, they have the flushed faces of schoolboys.

During her overnight stay, I discover that The Vision has a radiant good nature, bearing out yet again my observation that dazzling beauties seldom display the malice of their plainer sisters. Small wonder, you may say.

Apart from one fatty, the doctors are lean and fit. How is it that they have the highest rate of alcoholism and suicide in the land?

Some of the nurses are superb, kind, calm and efficient. When one of them has finished cleaning my wound, she's off to trim the Christmas tree. It stands in a corri- dor just outside our bay.

At four in the morning a great shouting wakes me. An Irishman is protesting furious- ly. Female nurses are trying to restrain him. He has one of those Irish voices which res- onate like an operatic baritone. He had his op. two days ago and he wants to go home. He thought he could slip away quietly in the night, undetected. Thwarted, he kicked in two big doors. Male voices join the melee. As the Irishman is wrestled to the ground, he opens his lungs wide: 'Help! Help! Help!' Someone jabs a needle in his bum.

My stay in hospital is the fourth this year. Everyone hopes to find an antibiotic which will conquer the hospital infection from my previous operation. Alas, since I've been back here, two more hospital germs have crept into my wounds.

My germs and I have now moved into an isolation room on the other side of the Christmas tree. It's like being chained in a white box. The first hint of claustrophobia arrives.

A big Rastafarian with knife wounds and a fractured leg has arrived with two guards. Because he is violent, my room beside the nurses' station is commandeered so they as well as his official minders can keep an eye on him. I am moved to another isolation MOM.

Friends tell me that when they phoned me at my previous number, a deep voice answered, 'She's been moved out. This is my cell now.'

I awake to a dirty dishwater dawn and find it's Christmas Eve.